16nm Huawei Kirin 950 SoC with Mali T880 GPU now official

Huawei today unveiled their next generation of Kirin SoC in an event in Beijing, China. The company had recently posted a teaser hinting the launch of the SoC today. Dubbed the Kirin 950, the SoC comes with all the specs that a user can expect in a flagship device.

The Kirin 950 SoC first got leaked in GeekBench a few months back. In fact a few days back a word had cropped up regarding the SoC stating that it is apparently faster than the Exynos 7420 - the present leader of the pack.

Huawei has used 16nm nodes to design the Kirin 950 SoC, thereby making it smaller, powerful and also power efficient. The Kirin 950 is an octa core SoC using 4 power saving Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz each coupled with 4 powerful Cortex A72 cores at 2.53GHz.

Furthermore Huawei has set up the SoC as a big.LITTLE processor which essentially means that not all eight cores will perform together. Normally the SoC will utilize the power saving A53 cores and will only shift to A72 if the device needs a power boost.

The GPU had always been a major issue with the Kirin SoC and Huawei seems to have noticed that. The company has included a latest gen Mali T880MP GPU with their chip. The rest of specs include a CAT 6 LTE modem and a tiny i5 chip which is used to run sensor like barometer, ambient light sensor etc.

Huawei claims that a device with Kirin 950 SoC and 3500mAh battery can deliver around 10 hours of on-screen time under ‘normal' conditions.